As someone with moderate keratoconus[0] and a belling reflex[1] that makes the opthamologist go fetch the residents because they need to see it, I am always looking forward to developments that might let me get new dang eyes, or at least replace my corneas.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratoconus#Signs_and_symptoms [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_phenomenon

This is not at all about opthamologists.

Ability to grow any organ from stem cells, let alone as complex as an eye, is breathtaking development that up until now was basically Sci-Fi.

I don't have a lot of knowledge in the field, but I believe that once we learn how to grow one organ there isn't a lot than more hard work to learn how to grow other organs.

I wonder if we will see the day where stem cells are collected at birth, and saved.

A woman has the baby, and the umbilical stem cells are collected, and put in a deep freeze. Instead of circumsision, that doctor would be more concerned about saving the stem cells?

Who knows what medical breakthroughs will come?

(I don't know much about stem cells, other than the political stuff associated woth them.)

This is done today by stem cell banks. They're typically used for treatment of diseases like leukemia. Public stem cell banks work similarly to blood banks, and there are private banks where your stem cells are saved for your family. Private banks are, in general, much more expensive.

From what I understand, though, stem cells don't last longer than a few years in storage. Making private banks a less useful.

Couldn't you get pregnant, abort the fetus and harvest stem cells?

(Or just farm fertilized eggs)

Doesn’t fat tissue contain enough stem cells to go around? I also don’t know much on that issue, but have seen that there are stem cell treatments that are based on a small liposuction.

I’m sure you’ve seen a large volume of research involving cross linking and such related to keratoconus. It’s my hope that in the future we find patients like yourself well before they have progressed to later stages and have therapies affordable enough to prevent further progression.

Edit: I forgot to mention but newer techniques for corneal transplant are within reach, and current techniques in the right hands are very successful at giving usable vision.

Best of luck!

BTW, also have keratoconus, if you haven't had crosslinking done yet I recommend it. It's FDA approved now (I had it before it was, which is why I mention it) and seems to be more widespread these days but I've met others who have keratoconus who are unaware of the procedures available. I haven't had degradation since the procedure nearly a decade ago.

How far are we off being able to regrow broken organs in humans? To be honest I guess doing Eye transplants is beyond our current ability even if we could grow them, but new hearts livers and kidneys could be very useful.

I’d imagine the limiting factor in all of these is still functionality of these organs. We can reorganize them to look somewhat like the actual organ (like in the linked article), but whether or not the organ functions the same is still under much investigation.

Also how do you connect up the nerves? A heart transplant works because the heart is basically self-regulating. But the eye needs thousands of nerves to connect to the brain to be useful.

Just grow nerves to the stem of the brain. Axons could do it, they did for everyone who was born with healthy eyes.

It would be quite an achievement though, because axons navigate their way by a gradients of some chemicals, which probably dissipate with age.

And problems will not end when nerves have grown. Brains would need to learn how to use them.

"Just"

I mean, that it doesn't matter how many axons are there, because no one is going to lay them one-by-one.

this word does a lot of work, it seems

This is weird because the vagus nerve and breathing rate can both slow/speed up the heart. What about when doing exercise, how is the signal sent to the heart to say speed up?

Cutting edge work in bioelectrical fields (see Michael Levin's lab) looks quite promising, although quite a long way off in terms of human applications. They can do all sorts of seemingly miraculous things in planaria.

Levin gave a mind boggling talk about some of their work a couple years ago: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg

I highly recommend this talk "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018" by Prof. Michael Levin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

How long before we get to have third eyes. Red dots are so inferior. I just find it amazing that this was visioned centuries ago by some drunk medieval monk, depicting demons in his sketchbook with a quill pen.

https://www.google.com/search?q=medieval+demons&hl=en&tbm=is...

Nexus-6 right around the corner then.

“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes”

Will this technique eventually extend to non embryonic stem cells?